Madman Mallarcky and the Sands of Seker-Ra
by mjonathanjones
Summary: An easy job and good pay, Alkazar had said. A box, small enough and light enough to carry in the palm of your hand, that needed to be delivered to the Tibesti Static. But then Madman Mallarcky, bounty-hunter for hire, had run into a lone airship from the Anti-Traction League. Now he was stranded on the edge of the Great Sand Seas, with a dry and dusty walk all the way to Tibesti…
1. Chapter 1

**Madman Mallarcky**

 **and the Sands of Seker-Ra**

 **A Tale of the Tibesti Static**

Set in the world of Philip Reeve's _Mortal Engines Quartet_

by

 **M. Jonathan Jones**

author of

 _Thalassa: the World beneath the Waves_

 _Race the Red Horizon – the Flight of the Pteronaut_

.com

 **2016**

 **Madman Mallarcky and the Sands of Seker-Ra:**

 **a Tale of the Tibesti Static**

by

M. Jonathan Jones

 _This tale is set during the Traction Era in the world of Philip Reeve's_ Mortal Engines Quartet _(rebranded as the Hungry Cities or Predator Cities series), slightly before the events of the first book_ Mortal Engines _._

 _Where there are differences between versions, I have kept the original names, as in the Stalker called Shrike._

 **1**

Rumours buzzed around Madman Mallarcky like a swarm of hungry dung-flies. No-one knew exactly where he had come from – the wrecked archipelagos of Australia, some said, or Dead America, said others – but no-one was sure and no-one dared to ask. All that was known with any certainty was that he had turned up one day in a static out-station on the fringes of the Northern Hunting Ground with a bad attitude and breath to match it, looking for the Stalker called Shrike. Imagine: looking for the Stalker! Most people gave the resurrected man a wide berth, and said their prayers if he was ever on their trail. Only a madman would ever set out to look for the last of the Lazarus Brigade. But that was just what Mallarcky did. And he found him, too.

"I WORK ALONE," Shrike had said, before making his point rather more directly, and when Mallarcky had regained consciousness and the bandages had come off, that had been good enough for him.

Since then he had plied his trade far and wide as a bounty-hunter for hire, sometimes working for the Anti-Traction League, sometimes in the service of the Traction Cities. He never seemed to care too much who he was working for as long as there was a job to be done and the pay came on time and in full at the end of it. Never a job too dirty, either; or at least, that was what people said.

So it was that the wastrels and wanderers sitting in the _Cheap & Cheerless_ fell silent when they recognised who had just walked in one evening from the dusty desert air of the Tibesti plateau.

"Drink," Madman Mallarcky said, sliding onto a barstool. The barstool was still warm – its previous occupant had wisely decided to take his custom elsewhere.

"Certainly, sir," the barman looked right and left for a way out, but his colleagues all seemed to have vanished too. "What'll it be?"

"Whisky. Three fingers," Madman Mallarcky replied. " _These_ fingers," he added, holding up a gory keepsake from some previous job that had been knotted together with barbed-wire.

"Yessir," the barman swallowed and tried to keep his hand steady as he filled the glass level with the wrinkled joints and blackened nails of the souvenir. "Er… On the house?"

"Much obliged," Mallarcky growled, poking the fingers back into one of his pockets. He tipped back his wide-brimmed hat, showing the panda face that the wind-blasted dust had given him around his night-vision goggles, and closed his eyes in appreciation as the contents of the glass slid down his throat.

The barman hovered uncertainly nearby, weighing up whether he might have time to dash for the door, and if he did, whether the storeroom or the space behind the pig-bins would be the best hiding place.

"Good," Mallarcky said with a nod of approval, his eyes flicking open again. He held out the glass, inclining it forwards for a refill.

"Glad you like it, sir," the barman tried to fill the glass at arm's reach. His hand trembled, and he splashed some of the whisky onto the bar.

"Or I could just take the bottle," Mallarcky suggested, and the barman nodded thankfully.

With a metallic _chink_ of his fingers, Mallarcky plucked the whisky-bottle from the barman's grip. "You serve food?"

As if on cue, there was a busy clatter from the kitchen, and the sizzling smell of hot fat and roasted meat wafted through the serving-hatch.

"Yes," the barman admitted, wringing his hands and stifling a sob.

"Smells like camel-hump stroganoff," Mallarcky took a long and appreciative sniff. "Send a plate over. I'll be sitting right…" he turned on the stool, scanning the darkest corners of the bar, and patrons abandoned their tables as if a loaded cannon had suddenly been pointed at them, "..over there."

Shaking the desert dust from his boots with every step, Mallarcky walked over to the table he had chosen. It stood half in shadow, with a good view of the front-door, the back-door close by, and the wall at his back; just how he liked it.

Beneath the long folds of his coat, weapons jingled: the rasp of metal on metal, the long dry rattle of a chain slinking across the stock of a short-barrelled shotgun, the heavy clunk of armour-piercing rounds jostling each other in an ammunition-pouch; a symphony of menace that reached a crescendo as Madman Mallarcky sat down, and then went silent. The clientele in the bar ebbed away, those who preferred a quieter life – or a longer one – vanished into the night, leaving just the hardcore who were too drunk to move or too tipsy to care.

The camel-hump stroganoff arrived, and Mallarcky tucked in. He ate quickly, like a man who had not had a bite for days. By habit his eyes roved around the bar as he ate, and he saw how it steadily filled up again with a new crowd: the curious, the unwary, and the thrill-seekers.

Perhaps their unwelcome guest was not so bad for business after all, the management of the _Cheap & Cheerless_ thought to themselves as they watched through a crack in the wall. Just as long as he didn't kill anyone.

Two figures came in. They went to stand by the bar for a minute to order a drink and maintain the pretence that they had wandered in by accident, and then they broke through the ranks of more or less surreptitious spectators and approached the table where Madman Mallarcky was sitting. The woman spoke first.

"You're Madman Mallarcky," she said. "Mind if we sit?"

"I'm eating," Mallarcky replied.

"And we'll be paying," the woman's male companion said, flashing a smile.

Mallarcky grunted his assent, and the two of them drew out a couple of chairs to sit down on, the legs scraping and yelping across the sticky floor.

"I'm Perfidy Lanyard," the woman said, "and this is my associate..."

"..Burdock Skink," the man wheeled out his smile again. "Pleased to meet you."

"Over the moon," Mallarcky mumbled.

He looked the two of them over casually. The man Skink certainly had a mis-spent youth behind him, plus a good few years on top of that which had not been spent much better. By the look of his clothes – an odd assortment of styles picked up here and there – he was part-digger, part-drifter, but he seemed to have weathered the storms of a restless life mostly intact. Despite that, there was a hint of fear in his eyes, like he had placed a bet that his luck might not cover.

The woman Lanyard was a much cooler customer. She gave every impression of being an up-and-coming air-trader, but anyone who has an 'associate' is generally a bit more than that. Her face was the kind that turned from beautiful to bestial in an instant if the person behind it was not one hundred percent satisfied with what life had to offer. Mallarcky would have bet good money that her demands were rarely refused.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"You," Perfidy Lanyard said. "Are your services for hire?"

"Always. For the right price," Mallarcky hawked up a hairy clod of hump that had been clinging to the roof of his mouth and spat it, along with a gizzardful of desert dust, onto the floor. The marbled concoction bounced into a corner with a fatty thud and wobbled to a standstill. "And I should warn you, I don't come cheap," he said, taking another bite of his meal.

"You look like a man with tired legs and money-bags as empty as your belly to me," Perfidy Lanyard remarked, glancing away from where the lump of fat had ended up. "I'm sure we can come to some arrangement."

"Maybe," Madman Mallarcky shrugged.

"Where's your ship?" Skink asked.

Mallarcky chewed another lump of gristle and forced it down. He smiled. "Suppose I told you it was moored up nice and safe in the air-harbour."

"No it ain't," Skink replied.

"We took the liberty of checking first," the air-trader who wasn't an air-trader cut in. "What happened?"

"A roving Fox Spirit belonging to the Anti-Traction League took exception to my flight-path and put a hole in one of my engine-pods," Mallarcky said. "I managed to land about a day's march from here."

"Unlucky," Perfidy Lanyard said. "I heard you were on good terms with the Anti-Traction League."

"No-one is on good terms with the Anti-Traction League," Mallarcky replied. "Not for long. What's the pay?"

"The pay is one hundred gold marks for five days' work. No more."

"One-fifty," Mallarcky said without looking up from his meal.

"One-twenty, and we'll tow your ship into harbour before we start. When the job is done, it'll be fixed and ready for you to leave. And you'll be able to pay for it."

"One-thirty," Mallarcky insisted. "And fifty of that up front."

"Alright," the woman nodded. "One-thirty it is. Now, don't you want to hear what the job is?"

Madman Mallarcky scraped his plate clean and licked his knife. "For fifty marks up front I am all ears," he said, leaning back in his chair. "These ears," he added, pointing to a necklace of withered brown husks that showed from under his coat.

8


	2. Chapter 2

**2**

Twenty minutes later, fed, whisky-ed, and watered, Madman Mallarcky left the _Cheap & Cheerless_ with a promise to meet Lanyard and Skink in an hour's time at the harbour where the air-ships were tethered. First, though, he had another appointment to keep; he had to conclude the business which had brought him to the Tibesti Static in the first place.

He walked along the narrow alleyways with the pleasantly heavy weight of fifty gold marks in his pocket, and the unpleasantly heavy weight of the camel-hump stroganoff in his belly. One lump of gristle too many, maybe; but to call it 'indigestion' presupposed he had been expecting to digest his meal in the first place. He spat into the dust, and a street-cat went chasing after something shiny that skittered through the pools of pale yellow lantern-light.

The dark desert night was drawing in, and behind him, on the main streets near the Western Gate, the evening trade in food, drink, and just about anything else a traveller might want was starting up in earnest. But the alleyways that Mallarcky sought out were empty except for the echo of his own footsteps and the scrawny cat playing with its new toy.

Down an alleyway so deep and so narrow that the white-walled houses either side seemed to have forgotten it was there, Mallarcky stopped and rapped hard on a heavy metal door. A grille opened in it, and there was the flash of a pair of eyes through the slits; eyes, or something that was sharp and dangerous.

"Mallarcky," he said gruffly, and bolts went back with the noise of gunfire. The door creaked open, a shadow in the shadows, and Madman Mallarcky vanished inside.

The man on the door led Mallarcky through one of the leaning white-walled houses that bordered the alleyway. He said nothing; the strong and silent type. Strong, certainly – his hands looked like they could twist the head off a Zagwan battle-rhino – and as for silent, there was a scar running down his chin that some of the local tribes used to mark out those whose tongues had been cut out for thieving. The man also had a pair of wide-open eyes tattooed on the back of his shaven head, but even without the sight of them bobbing in front of him, Mallarcky knew that he was being watched the whole time.

After a twist and a turn, Mallarcky and his escort entered an open courtyard. It was filled with the sound of water tinkling from a fountain and the smell of apricots from a bush that sprawled on the sunny-side. A man was sitting in a very comfortable chair beneath the fronds of a small palm tree.

"Ah, Mr Mallarcky," the man said, his Airsperanto vowels oozing with the Tibesti accent. "Please, sit."

Akhenaten Alkazar gestured to a seat opposite his own, and Madman Mallarcky sat down. As he did, he glimpsed more sharp and dangerous flashes from several of the windows that faced into the courtyard. The seat he was sitting in was out in the open, overlooked from every possible angle.

"I have heard that you suffered some inconvenience on your journey to Tibesti," Alkazar said. "I am both glad and grateful that you have arrived here in one piece."

"Word gets around," Mallarcky said.

"Please accept my apologies for any trouble you may have suffered on my behalf. And an extra twenty gold marks on top of the agreed fee. I hope that goes some way to offsetting your costs."

Mallarcky grunted without looking too happy.

The meaning of the grunt was not lost on Alkazar. "Send me the bill and I will of course also pay for any repairs to your ship," he said, and he tutted sympathetically. "For a single unaccompanied Anti-Tractionist Fox Spirit to be so far west is unusual indeed."

"I thought so."

"Curious," Alkazar's lips flickered with a faint smile. "But you are here, the gods be praised! So. Do you have it?"

"Of course. Or I wouldn't have come," Mallarcky said.

Slowly, and with an eye on the windows above, he reached inside the innermost folds of the coat. Unseen watchers focused all their attention on what he was about to do next, and he could feel the atmosphere in the courtyard tightening around him like a noose. But when he drew his hand out again, it held nothing more than a small jewelled box. The atmosphere in the courtyard relaxed a little.

Madman Mallarcky placed the box on the table in front of him, and one of Alkazar's men stepped forwards out of nowhere, picked up the box, and vanished again.

"Excellent!" Alkazar said. "I had heard you were the kind of man to see a job through." He snapped his fingers, and another man stepped out of the shadows and placed a bag of money on the table where before the box had been. "Your fee. With those twenty extra marks for your trouble."

Mallarcky kept his eyes fixed on Alkazar and weighed the bag as he took it. "Much obliged," he said with a smile, satisfied with what he felt.

"And now, Mr Mallarcky, if you will excuse me," Alkazar gave a little bow, but already he was wrapping his robes around himself and getting to his feet, "I have other business to attend to. My thanks to you. I hope one day we may have the pleasure of working together again."

"Likewise," Mallarcky slipped the bag of gold into his coat and heard the rustle of the coins as they made themselves at home there. And then the man with the eyes in the back of his head appeared to lead him back to the alleyway and the night sounds of Tibesti.

Akhenaten Alkazar wandered out of the courtyard and into one of the reception rooms furthest from the street. His sandals skipped across the cool tiles, and he held the jewelled box in his fingers. A lantern flared from red to yellow, its light suddenly filling the room.

"You know, it _is_ curious," he said to the person sitting next to the lantern, "that a lone Anti-Traction League Fox Spirit should be so far west."

"Stranger things have happened," Perfidy Lanyard replied.

"Stranger, perhaps," Alkazar agreed. "But…"

"But what?"

Alkazar shrugged.

"You have a suspicious mind, Alkazar."

"Thank you, Miss Lanyard," he inclined his head. "If nothing else, it has kept me alive."

"And made you very rich into the bargain," Perfidy Lanyard waved a heavy pouch full of coins in the air. "I think our business is all wrapped up this time around," she said, dropping the pouch onto the table with the lantern. "My thanks."

Alkazar tried to ignore the gold, but his eyes moved away from it reluctantly. "Always a pleasure to be of service to Magnus Crome and the London Guild of Engineers." He held out the box. "Your delivery."

"Keep it," Lanyard said. She stood up and slipped a small key onto the table next to the gold. "It's of no further use to me. Now, I have an appointment at the air-harbour. If your men could show me to the back exit."

"Of course," Alkazar nodded, and clapped his hands.

He sat down in the seat that Perfidy Lanyard had occupied and watched her go. When her steps had receded down the hallway, he picked up the pouch of money and spilled its shining contents into his lap. His eyes darted this way and that, like a lizard on a dungheap trying to decide which fly to pick off first, and he reassured himself that his fee was all there. With fingers that caressed each and every gold mark, he coaxed and cajoled the coins back into the pouch, and replaced it on the table.

Then he took up that box again. It didn't make any sound when he rattled it, and it wasn't particularly heavy, either. He got one of his men to unlock it, just in case – someone in his position could never be too careful, working for both Tractionists and the League – and when he was certain the box was safe, he looked inside. The box was empty.

A strange business, Alkazar thought to himself, to have someone carry an empty box all the way across the desert. An even stranger business for that someone to encounter a rogue airship from the Anti-Traction League on the way. It was Magnus Crome's business, not his, but all the same Akhenaten Alkazar couldn't help wondering what – apart from himself – Madman Mallarcky had actually been paid to deliver.

6


	3. Chapter 3

**3**

A warm wind fluttered through the open porthole, and Madman Mallarcky leaned into it, blinking against the dust-grains that it managed to carry high into the sky. Behind him, behind the whirr and the whine of the propeller-pods, the mazy streets and high walls of the Tibesti Static blended into the background with the morning haze.

After his business with Alkazar the previous evening, he had re-joined Perfidy Lanyard and Burdock Skink at the air-harbour. With the sun sinking below the horizon and the last rosy light fading from the slopes of the five shield volcanoes of Tibesti, they had flown out to where Mallarcky's damaged airship, the _Filthy Shades of Grey_ , was moored in the foothills.

It was a journey that had taken him all day on foot, up and across the scree slopes that were as black as if they had been scorched by the sun overhead. By air, heading into the dusk, the journey had been cool and calm and over in less than an hour. Another hour of fixing up the mooring-cables to Lanyard and Skink's _Chim Chim Cher-oo_ , and Mallarcky had been back at the controls of his invalid vessel, being towed towards the lights of the Static that twinkled and shimmered under the dark sky.

He had left the _Filthy Shades_ behind at the air-harbour – together with twenty of those gold marks – in return for a promise from the mechanics that it would be repaired and ready for him when he returned. If he returned.

Now they were underway again in the _Chim Chim Cher-oo_. It was unusual for Madman Mallarcky to be flying anywhere and not sitting at the controls himself, and he took the opportunity to study his new-found colleagues.

Burdock Skink was in the navigator's seat, consulting the compass and poring over a big chart of mostly white paper. A few lines cut across the empty spaces it showed, but they were faint and tentative, as if none of them were too sure that they should really be there. Skink was looking distinctly like he would rather be somewhere else himself. He licked his lips more frequently than the heat and dry desert-air really warranted, and he fidgeted in his seat when he thought no-one was looking.

Perfidy Lanyard was sitting next to Skink in the pilot's seat. From time to time, she nudged the wheel to correct their course against the wind without really thinking about it or she teased the throttle levers when it suited her. She seemed perfectly relaxed and unconcerned by whatever lay ahead. All the same, Mallarcky had spotted the bulge of a pistol spoiling the cut of her flight-jacket. Untroubled Perfidy Lanyard might be, but she had come prepared for some, nevertheless.

So far, the two of them had been as good as their word. Mallarcky didn't really trust them; but then again, he didn't really trust anyone. Their story – about being hired to hunt down an expedition belonging to the Guild of Historians from the great traction city of London – didn't make much sense. Most Historians Mallarcky had come across were far too concerned with polishing artefacts and classifying their collections to ever consider venturing away from the museum to do any real exploring: that kind of work they left to people like Thaddeus Valentine, or to someone like Lanyard herself. If Lanyard and Skink were looking for a lost party of Historians, a posse of local tracker nomads would be more use than a bounty-hunter like Madman Mallarcky. And the deserts east of the Tibesti Static were far from London's usual haunts. Whatever would its Historians be looking for out there?

All in all, Madman Mallarcky suspected that he had been hired because there might be killing to be done. Who and why didn't usually bother him, except that the 'who' and the 'why' were usually stated explicitly somewhere in the job description. There was more than a hint of something devious churning away somewhere, and it wasn't just that camel-hump stroganoff coming back to haunt him. So he was wary, sitting there; at least what was left of that gold felt reassuringly solid in his pocket.

He turned and squinted into the warm wind once more. The tattered rag of the _Cher-oo_ 's shadow rippled effortlessly over the desert below, over the outcrops baking in the rising heat, over the sand-dunes shouldered together in marching rows, and over the little-used tracks that ran away into nothing. The endless dunes really did look like rolling waves, blown into long lines by the steady winds that swept across the wide expanse of the Great Sand Sea to the north. Occasionally, the dune-waves broke in foamy trails of pebbles around tiny islands of rock, standing blasted and barren under the blazing sun. But apart from that there was not much to see: just sand, sand, and more sand.

One desert looked pretty much the same as another to Mallarcky, and how the nomads knew where the Great Sand Sea ended, he could not say, but they had come to the beginning of a region which warranted a name all of its own: the Sands of Seker-Ra. The nomad trails went wide around them, and the Eastern Gate of the Tibesti Static that faced them had been barred and unused for many long years. The people living behind the protection of its high walls turned their eyes away from the Sands of Seker-Ra, and made the sign of protection if any newcomers made the mistake of mentioning them by name. But that was just where they were going, and as Mallarcky sat there staring out at nothing, the shadows in the cabin shifted, and the _Chim Chim Cher-oo_ changed course to head out above the trackless dunes.

3


	4. Chapter 4

**4**

"Constantin-Opel dead ahead," Skink announced from the navigator's seat. And just as he said it, the rusted rim of the lost Traction City curved up above the sand on the horizon like some ancient sea-monster coming up for air. Dread of the Sands of Seker-Ra had prevented even the most salvage-hungry nomads searching for it. But here it was. It was a sight that made even Madman Mallarcky stir from his seat and stand up to get a good view.

Lost for hundreds of years, Constantin-Opel had passed into legend, even in the Static settlements on the bare earth. In some people's eyes it was nothing more than a Tractionist version of the golden pyramids of El Dorito, the mythical lost city of the Statics, and with just as little claim on reality. Depending on which of the many dubious sources was consulted, Constantin-Opel had wheels made of the purest gold with axles and drive-shafts of solid silver, or it was paved with crystal and diamond. Some people even believed that it contained the fabled Fountain of Eternal Mobility.

"Poppycock!" Skink said. "Balderdash! Rust, dust, and rats. That's what we found. Thousands of rats. What them rats live on, I don't like to think."

" 'We?' You two?" Mallarcky asked, looking from Skink to Lanyard.

"Me and my ex-partner, Twerk Groynestreyne," Skink replied, folding up the map he had been consulting and handing it to Perfidy Lanyard. "Course, he went and did the dirty on me, didn't he? Running off and blabbing to Magnus Crome about what we'd found. For all the good it did him and his Historian mates. They're all shrivelled up down there somewhere, I hope!" Skink's face wrinkled up in disgust and he spat out of the window; as luck would have it, on the leeward side of the cabin.

"Which is when I stepped in," Perfidy Lanyard said. "Skink needed a backer, didn't you Skink?"

Skink nodded, but he had that shifty nervous look again.

"So no gold, no diamonds, no inexhaustible fuel-supply. Just some rats and a bunch of lost Historians. And what were they after, I wonder?" Madman Mallarcky watched as Perfidy Lanyard opened the vents to the ballonets, filling them with air to offset the buoyancy of the lifting-gas.

"No idea," she said, adjusting the elevators to bring the _Chim Chim Cher-oo_ on an approach to the ruined Traction City. "What Historians always look for, I suppose. Secrets."

Perfidy Lanyard gave him a sideways sort of smile, but Madman Mallarcky was not satisfied with that.

"And we're looking for the Historians because…?"

"Because I'm paying you," she answered, her tone grating a little.

"Fair enough," he shrugged under his coat. "I just want to know who I'm working for."

"You're working for _me_ ," Perfidy Lanyard said. "That's all you need to worry about. Besides, what do you care?"

"I don't," Mallarcky gave another shrug. "Gold is gold."

"Well then."

"And trouble is trouble."

Perfidy Lanyard and Skink exchanged a look. "What makes you think there's going to be any trouble?"

Madman Mallarcky bared his yellowed teeth in a wide grin. "Because you brought _me_ along," he said.

Gently, the _Chim Chim Cher-oo_ dipped in low under the towering rim of Constantin-Opel, and the shadow of the wrecked Traction City fell across it, deep and dark and chill where the sun could never reach. Perfidy Lanyard slowed the engines and the navigation lights flared on, reflecting off the underside of the metal deck-plates where the wind-blown sand had stripped them down and polished them mirror-bright. Skink meanwhile had gone aft to drop the sand-anchors, and the airship creaked to a stop as they scooped along through the drifts below.

"You taking notes or something, Mallarcky?" Skink asked, casting out the mooring-lines and the ladder. He glanced over to where the bounty-hunter was once more lounging at ease in his seat with his feet up and his hands clasped behind his head.

Mallarcky peered at the navigator and his handiwork from under half-closed eyelids. Skink's temper was a little frayed at the edges.

"Not bad," he replied, but he still didn't move – he wasn't being paid to lend a hand. Or to calm Skink's nerves.

Then with a tut and a shake of his head, Skink was gone, down the ladder to the cool sand below to tie off the mooring-lines to something.

Perfidy Lanyard shut down the engines and also came aft. "Time to start earning those gold marks, Mallarcky. After you," she gestured to the ladder, and the Madman rose slowly to his feet with a nod and a jingle of hidden weaponry, and climbed down to where Skink was waiting.

Down below on the sand, conditions were almost bearable. The shadow cast by the rim of Constantin-Opel would have been too cold without the warm desert wind, and the desert wind would have been too warm without the chill of the shadow, but they seemed to have reached an amiable compromise.

Pools of water had collected in the hollows and dips around the city's huge tracks, the remnants of the sand-sea's last bout of rare rainfall, all fringed around with straggling greenery. A scatter of birds went up into the air as Lanyard, Skink, and Mallarcky drew closer to the pools, and there was even a well-trodden track that showed how wild goats or camels came to drink there.

All in all, it was the kind of sheltered place that someone in the desert might have decided to make a home – if they had ever dared to live among the dunes of Seker-Ra in the first place.

The three of them wandered along under the mirrored metal sky of the deck-plates as it plunged lower and lower above their heads, running down to where the desert had swallowed the stranded city. Then they cut out from under the arch of the rim and into the bright sunlight again, blinking in the glare.

Where the sand had piled itself into a dune, they clambered up its rounded slope and onto the upper surface of Constantin-Opel. Years of night-time condensation and morning dew had rusted the surface of the deck-plates, and the metal baked in the heat. Ruined buildings along the edge looked surprised to see them, all staring windows and open-mouthed doorways. The travellers stared back, making their way through the buckled streets until they stood in what would once have been a pleasant courtyard. Now the wind hissed around the bark-bare branches of dead trees, bleached as white as bone by the sun. Perfidy Lanyard took out a map and unfolded it, wrestling with the corners as it flapped in the breeze.

"This map shows where the expedition hid a cache of supplies just in case they needed them on their return journey," she said, noticing Mallarcky's interest in the map without really looking at him.

"Constantin-Opel wasn't their final destination?" he asked.

"No."

"So where were they going?"

"Somewhere else."

"Where?"

"All in good time, Mallarcky. First we check the cache, to see whether the Historians came back this way." She glanced away from him dismissively, searching across the tattered skyline for a landmark to steer by. "This way," she finally said, pointing down one of the dusty boulevards.

The three of them walked along the boulevard in slow silence, watchful of the dark windows and shadowy doorways. If the Historian had returned to pick up their supplies, there was no sign of them: the shifting sands had covered any trail they might have left. To all appearances, Lanyard, Mallarcky, and Skink could have been the first people ever to stumble upon the ruined city. A herd of goats fled at the sound of their approach, and the only other living thing they saw was a wheeling bird making wide circles in the sky.

Following the map, they twisted and turned through the empty streets for another few blocks until they got to what appeared to be the epicentre of the damage. The deck-plates ahead of them were buckled from the city's demise, and several levels had collapsed and lay pressed tight and flat on top of each other, like steel strata in a mountain of metal. Where the supports were still intact, the surviving lower-levels of Constantin-Opel vanished into darkness.

"This is where the cache was hidden," Perfidy Lanyard said. She flashed a dagger-bright smile at Mallarcky and handed him the map. "Off you go, bounty-hunter. Go and see if they – or anyone else – ever came back this way to take it."

"Right," Mallarcky found the short-barrelled shotgun where it hung at the end of its chain under the folds of his coat. He pushed his night-vision goggles up over his eyes to touch the wide brim of his hat, and clicked them on. The desert vanished in a green glare. Without a backward glance, he walked to the breach in the deck-plates, and hopped down into the dark.

It was easy enough getting down inside the structure of Constantin-Opel, almost as easy as walking down a staircase, albeit a haphazard one built for giant-sized strides. Where the support-columns had collapsed, Madman Mallarcky went from the rooftops of one level onto the rooftops and deck-plates of the level below, dropping down until the sky had become a jagged tear high above, and the wind's hissing had become a distant booming. As he went deeper, away from the worst of the damage, the concertina creases of the city unfolded like a bent and broken pop-up book. The air currents died around him, and the layer of dust on the ground grew thinner and thinner, until eventually Madman Mallarcky was treading bare metal again.

He checked his options, standing still and peering around at the shadow-filled avenues of the dead city. They fizzed grey-green in the glow of his night-vision. Then he found where the map said he needed to go. With the shotgun held out ahead of him, he ventured away from the route that led back up to the surface.

Further and further from the distant patch of sky, the booming of the wind quietened, becoming something that was felt rather than heard, a disquieting throb that tickled his ribs. Madman Mallarcky went slowly with noiseless steps, but the dark echoed with the hollow _plunk_ , _plunk_ of dripping water that had found its way in from somewhere, and down the side-streets he could hear the dry scuffling of clawed feet. A quick glance down one of them and he saw the twinkle of a dozen pairs of eye-shine as something turned and ran. Rats. Of course there were rats. Skink had said there would be, and all cities have their rats, even the dead ones.

At the next turning, there was a recent daub of paint on a support-pillar – a sign that he was on the right track. Madman Mallarcky took the turn and wandered along an old promenade that must have once overlooked a public park, green and calming and open to the sky. Now the upper-levels had leaned right down over it, shutting it off from the light and the open air. The square of grass at the centre of the park was a patch of parched grey earth, stubbled with straw as tough as brush-bristles, and an ornamental pond looked like any other bare scrape of Traction-tracks, without so much as a puddle for charm. Somehow, a soft sigh of the wind had found its way down to the park with him, rustling leaves as dry as dust in the corners, and setting a children's swing swaying to and fro.

Then Madman Mallarcky was there. The supply cache appeared stacked up in the middle of the promenade in front of him. The metal boxes full of food and water were intact and untouched, apart from some futile gnawings along one edge and a dried-out cluster of rat droppings to show what the local residents thought about things. Mallarcky made a careful survey of the cache from all angles before he approached it any closer, but he was certain that no-one had been there since the supplies had been deposited. The party had not come back that way.

Before he left, he took a moment to rifle through some of the boxes, just in case. Food and water might be what was written on the outside, but only a fool would take that at face value. The contents of the boxes themselves were unremarkable. The brand-mark on them, however, that did raise an eyebrow; it was not the lidless eye of the London Guild of Historians that Madman Mallarcky saw emblazoned there, but the wheel – the insignia of the London Guild of Engineers. Not a party of Historians, then, but Engineers – Magnus Crome had a finger in this pie. And behind one stack of boxes, Mallarcky made the most surprising discovery of all.

As he turned and retraced his steps back to the surface, Madman Mallarcky had two questions to consider. One question was nothing new – it was the reason for this search-and-possibly-rescue expedition he had been paid to accompany: if the vanished Historians/Engineers had not returned to recover their supplies, what had been their fate out in the wider wastes of Seker-Ra? The second question was rather more curious, and it centred around the surprising discovery that he had made among the boxes of the supply-cache: what had the party needed with a ten-foot high cage of reinforced steel?

Madman Mallarcky was very much a betting man, and he would have laid good money that answering the second question would also provide the answer to the first.

8


	5. Chapter 5

**5**

Night came stealing across the dunes, filling up the spaces between them, and Perfidy Lanyard brought the _Chim Chim Cher-oo_ in to land. Constantin-Opel had been left far behind, and with the supply-cache untouched, the search for the lost party had begun in earnest.

For hours, Lanyard and Skink and Mallarcky had been staring out of the windows of the _Cher-oo_ 's gondola, looking across the empty miles of sand for any signs of the airship that had carried the lost expedition into the sands of Seker-Ra. With the daylight fading, there was a good chance they would miss it – or any wreckage of it – in the dark. So as the stars gathered above them, they set up camp on the ground and prepared to begin the search again at dawn.

When the sun rose, Madman Mallarcky was already standing up on the crest of a dune. The golden light threw his long shadow back across the sand towards the tethered _Chim Chim Cher-oo_.

"Enjoying the sunrise?" Perfidy Lanyard asked, trudging up the slope behind him. "I didn't see you as the type to commune with nature."

"There's something out there," Mallarcky said, without turning around.

Perfidy Lanyard scrunched up to the sandy summit beside him, and stared out across the desert. Row upon row of dunes marched off into the distance, blending with the sky as the haze thickened on the horizon. "I can't see anything," she said, shielding her eyes.

"Not see. Smell. Vegetation," Mallarcky pointed. "That way, I'd guess."

Perfidy Lanyard wrinkled her nose and screwed up her eyes. Then she took a step to the left, away from the curious fug of sweat, gunpowder, pistol-oil, camel-hump stroganoff, and badly preserved bodyparts that seemed to surround the bounty-hunter. She sniffed again. Mallarcky was right; there _was_ something green and growing out there. "An oasis?"

"Seems like it."

"A good place to head for if you'd crashed out in the middle of nowhere," she started to pace down the dune. "I'll tell Skink to warm up the engines."

They flew high above the sand, casting a tiny black dot down below and scanning the landscape for any signs of vegetation. A dark stain of something showed up in a hollow where the dunes had parted, and as they turned towards it, the colour gradually sharpened into lush green, and there was a twinkle of sunlight on standing water. It was the oasis, a miniscule pocket of life in the dead dust.

"I think we've found them," Mallarcky said suddenly, and he pointed away from the oasis that held their attention. Between the dunes a few hundred yards away from the water and trees, the blackened ribs of an airframe stood bare in the sand, with the crushed can of the gondola beneath it. Flags of the air-ship's gas-envelope fluttered desperately in the wind.

Perfidy Lanyard steered the _Cher-oo_ around, looping down in ever tighter circles, until they dropped the sand-anchors and scraped to a stop. "Moor her to the ribs," she said from the pilot's seat. "Mallarcky, you go down first."

Madman Mallarcky nodded and slid down the ladder, dropping the last ten feet and rolling away from it with his shotgun cradled and ready. He looked quickly left and right, but all he could see was sand and blackened metal and the hissing wind lifting the dune-tops. More sand was already creeping in around the broken spars and struts of the airframe, and the smell of burning was faint, carried away the wind. He stood up and marched around, wary of any signs of recent disturbance. But the airship had lain untouched since it had come down. And it had been moored up when the gas-cells had ignited; he could see the mooring-lines still attached.

"No bodies," he called up to where Skink's face peered out from the gondola of the _Cher-oo_. "Looks like it was fired from the ground with nobody onboard."

Skink scuttled down the ladder and came up beside him. "Moored, just like you said," he kicked at the buried sand-anchors. "An accident?"

Perfidy Lanyard appeared with a scowl on her face. "Maybe. Either way, the crew's not here. Let's go and check the oasis."

Leaving the _Cher-oo_ moored up to the wreckage, the three of them trudged the short distance to the oasis. As they approached, the wind rustled through bushes and trees, bringing the wholesome smell of green and growth with it. The breeze freshened as it blew across a wave-dappled pool of water, and it seemed cooler even before they got to the shade of the towering palms. But there was no sign of any camp or of any survivors from the airship. There was no sign of any human life at all. At least, not at first.

"There's something over there," Perfidy Lanyard said, gesturing towards a mis-placed dune on the far side of the pool. Only as they looked closer, they saw that it was no wind-blown heap of sand. Unlike the sweeping dunes that stood apart from it around the edges of the oasis, the mound was symmetrical, almost pyramidal in shape, and sunk into one of its sloping sides was the darkness of a half-open doorway.

Casting cautious looks in all directions, Lanyard and Skink and Mallarcky walked slowly around the edges of the pool towards the mound. The doorway stood like a sliver of night-dark, and the air lurked chill and damp in the throat of it. The edges of the doorway were unmarked. There were no inscriptions of any sort that might give some clue as to how old the mound was, or who had built it. For all the three of them could tell, it might have stood there through all the long centuries since the Sixty Minute War.

"You first, Mallarcky," Perfidy Lanyard said when they got to the doorway.

Mallarcky peered under the heavy stone lintel. Someway inside, the floor sloped downwards, and beyond that, the shadow seemed to suck all the heat from the desert.

"No," he said flatly.

"No?" Lanyard repeated. She lifted her shoulders and narrowed her eyes. "No job too dirty, that's what I heard. We had a deal."

Mallarcky smiled. "We did. But I'm mad, not stupid, and it looks to me like you need me to go down there a lot more than I need one hundred and thirty gold marks. But not more than I need, oh, let me see…," he had another quick peek down the passageway. "Maybe four hundred gold marks, say."

"Four hundred marks!"

"Yep. _And_ you'll tell me what the party was looking for. What has the London Guild of Engineers got to do with the expedition? Why did they leave a cage of reinforced steel in the supply-cache?"

Perfidy Lanyard's lips parted, and whether she was going to consent to Mallarcky's terms or to make a more colourful comment, she never got around to either. The sand all around them started to move, a slow slip that got suddenly faster and faster, piling in around their legs as they sank deeper and deeper into it. Before any of them could struggle even one step, the desert opened up beneath them and swallowed them whole.

5


	6. Chapter 6

**6**

A blinding blizzard carried the three of them with it, tumbling them down beneath the surface. Lanyard, Skink, and Mallarcky did not fall far before they caught up with solid ground again, but when they did, it sloped away so that they could find no grip. The avalanche of sand swirled them around and around until metal bars rang out, blocking their way, and they came to an abrupt and bruising stop.

The sand spilled away through the spaces between the bars, leaving them high and dry. A door clanged shut across the way they had come, caging them. The last of the sand whispered on into the sloping dark and the cage followed it. Steel grated on stone, the cage swaying fitfully, until the tunnel ended and the cage went swinging out into a vast space deep beneath the desert.

Firelight from torches flickered across stone walls that were blackened and burnt from years of smoke, and directly below them was a circular pit, wide and straight-sided, and deep enough to prevent anyone from climbing out of it. Arranged around the pit were concentric rows of stone benches. The benches were filling rapidly with people, a whole subterranean city full of them. Hundreds of pairs of eyes glistened in the firelight, watching their progress through the air.

Skink pulled out a pistol, but the cage swayed like a ship in a storm, keeping the captives off-balance. He slipped on the bars that formed the floor, and his wayward shot screeched off the stonework.

"Save your ammo', Skink," Perfidy Lanyard called out. "We may need it."

"I have a feeling we're going to need more than ammo' to get out of here," Mallarcky said. "Whoever these people are, they don't seem to care very much that we're armed."

He gripped the bars tight and stared around the chamber as they dropped below the level of the benches and into the pit. Carvings in the walls trembled in the flickering firelight, carvings of dismembered victims in various poses, a mixture of agony and terror written in their faces. But whether real or depiction, dead or alive, all the eyes in the vast amphitheatre stared in the same direction.

At the centre of the pit stood a tall stone sarcophagus on a raised disc of granite. The sarcophagus was covered with more tortured torsos and screaming faces, and running down inside it from a weight-and-pulley system in the ceiling was a taut chain of sturdy metal links.

"I think I found your Engineers," Mallarcky pointed out a dozen shrivelled heads stuck on spikes around the arena. All of the heads were shaven bald and bore the wheel-mark of the Guild of Engineers between their brows. "That's four hundred marks you owe me."

In the next breath the floor of the cage swung open, and Skink, Lanyard and Mallarcky plunged a dozen feet into the pit. They rolled in the dirt, coming up battered and even dustier than they had been before. The crowds were all staring down at them now, not at the empty cage as it was winched back into the darkness beyond the torchlight.

A sudden hush descended on the crowd, and at the same moment a figure stepped out onto a platform at the far end of the arena. The figure – man or woman, it was impossible to tell behind the tattoos that covered every inch of skin – raised its arms. Its voice boomed out, distorted so much by the cavernous space that it gave no more clues than the tattooed face as to whether it belonged to a priest or a priestess.

"What's it saying, Skink?" Perfidy Lanyard asked, but Skink just gave a nervous little shrug.

"Ain't like anything I ever heard in Tibesti," he muttered. "It ain't like anything I ever heard before."

But the final words that the figure spoke needed no translation: "Seker-Ra!" it shouted, and then again, "Seker-Ra!"

The crowd took up the chant, quiet at first but getting louder with every repetition, clapping, stomping along with the shout: "Seker-Ra! Seker-Ra!"

Then, between the shouts, another noise could be heard, the clunk of hidden gear-wheels turning and of chains ticking under tension. With a sudden grunt, the hollow cylinder of the sarcophagus at the centre of the pit started to descend into the floor, revealing what it had enclosed.

First the head came into view, a burnished steel skull-cap with pipes snaking away into the torso. Then the metal body itself, with the chain from the roof welded between its shoulder-blades, and finally two arms and two legs, armoured and flexing. As the hollow cylinder of his prison vanished at his feet, the terrible dead face of Seker-Ra turned to look at them with glowing green eyes.

"Stalker!" Mallarcky hissed. Now he knew why the expedition had brought a reinforced steel cage with it, and why he had been hired.

Seker-Ra took a heavy step forwards, straining against the pull of the counterweights that hung from the other end of the chain and kept him captive in the pit. He surveyed the scene, switching through the full spectrum of his sight. Baying Once-Born sat in safety around the arena, shouting the name that they had given to him in the dark ages of his imprisonment, and three others were standing in the pit with him: the offering to his blood-lust.

He no longer remembered his long journey from the battlefields of the north, or what his Stalker-name had once been. How he came to be there, the prisoner of a people living beneath the sands since the Sixty Minute War, he had also forgotten. Immortal and invincible, he had become a captive deity to the survivors in their subterranean hiding-place. For centuries they had worshipped him, the power and the terror of the desert made real.

Step by powerful step, Seker-Ra descended from circular plinth at the centre of the pit and looked across the multitude, more gladiator than god. The crowds sent up a wild cheer as he raised his arms and his finger-glaives hissed and shimmered in the torchlight. Even when he had forgotten everything else, he still knew how to kill.

Skink was the first to react. He drew his pistol and fired a shot at Seker-Ra. The bullet whined off into the torchlight, and Seker-Ra stopped where he was and stared Skink full in the face.

"I think you're making him mad, Skink," Perfidy Lanyard said.

Skink fired again and again, but all his shots rebounded off the Stalker's armour, zipping and zinging away.

Seker-Ra took another slow and careful step, pulling against the chain, lifting the counterweights foot by foot into the air.

"Seker-Ra! Seker-Ra!" the crowd chanted, getting louder and louder as their terrible deity strode forth.

"Skink! Run!" Lanyard called out, and Skink tried, but all his legs could do was fold up under him and leave him kneeling in the dust. In two strides the Stalker was there.

"Seker-Ra! Seker-Ra! Seker-RA!" the crowd cried and the finger-glaives sliced through the air, the clamour of voices almost drowning out the soggy thump as Skink's head went bowling into a corner.

Perfidy Lanyard drew her pistol, but clearly it was going to be as much use as a bunch of flowers and an offering of cake at stopping Seker-Ra in his tracks. She edged into hiding behind Madman Mallarcky.

"Your turn, Mallarcky. You've fought a Stalker before and survived. Stop him."

"I didn't fight Shrike and I didn't survive," the bounty-hunter replied. "Shrike gave me his version of friendly advice and let me live. No-one wins against a Stalker. Ever."

"Then what am I paying you for?" Perfidy Lanyard tutted, and with a last look over Mallarcky's shoulder at the approaching figure of Seker-Ra, she made a run for it.

Seker-Ra watched Perfidy Lanyard race towards the side of the pit. She would be an easy catch, and he wanted a little sport. He allowed her a few seconds' head-start and then he turned in her direction, pulling and straining to follow.

The Stalker had taken one step when the dull _whoof_ of an armour-piercing shell took one of his legs out from under him. Seker-Ra fell face forwards, and with his traction lost, the falling counterweights at the end of the chain dragged him backwards through the dirt. He rammed his fingers into the ground and stopped himself. Slowly, Seker-Ra pulled himself back to his feet, and he stared around at where Madman Mallarcky stood with his shotgun smoking.

Mallarcky didn't even bother firing his second shot. He let the shotgun fall away on its chain and took a step forwards, arms raised. With a sound like a sneezing snake, a set of salvaged Stalker finger-glaives hissed out from the bounty-hunter's gloves.

"Seker-Ra!" he called out. "Playtime!" and he beckoned with a razor-sharp finger.

The Stalker-god looked at him, this defiant Once-Born, and its green eyes flickered. Was this mockery, or something else?

Seker-Ra strode forwards, the slow menacing stride of the Stalkers, deathless and fearless. Behind him, the chain that had been welded into him armour creaked and clanked, paying out through the pulley-system as his incredible strength hoisted the two huge stone counterweights into the air.

Madman Mallarcky knew how Stalkers kill – he had seen it often enough, trailing along in Shrike's bloody wake for months on end. And he still remembered the first Stalker-kill he had seen, when Shrike had come to the small out-country settlement, no more than a few huts in a hole in the ground, to collect the bounty on the malicious mistake-on-two-legs that had been Mallarcky's step-father. It was still crystal clear in his mind, the glint of moonlight on those razor-edged blades, and the cool clean hiss they made as they sliced through the air…

The first attack came sweeping across at head level, and Mallarcky met it with his own finger-glaives, a clash of Stalker-steel that sent sparks flying. The force of the blow knocked Mallarcky sideways, and Seker-Ra's second strike followed, lunging up from below – a blow that was intended to slice open the flesh of Mallarcky's belly and gut him.

Not flesh.

More steel. More sparks.

Mallarcky staggered backwards. The shreds of his coat flapped open, and beneath them, the torchlight glinted blood-red from the patchwork plates of salvaged Stalker-steel that he had stitched into his own skin.

Seker-Ra saw the stalker-steel implanted in Mallarcky's body and if his deathless face could be said to frown, it frowned.

 _Interesting._

But not interesting enough to spare Mallarcky's life.

Another ringing blow. Another clash of finger-glaives. Then Seker-Ra struck out fiercely, feinting and changing direction. The blades caught Mallarcky across the shoulder.

This time there was flesh to cut and blood was drawn. The crowed cheered as Mallarcky reeled, and Seker-Ra advanced with his green eyes throbbing. The Stalker's arms were a blur, and it was all that Mallarcky could do to ward them off.

Some people in the crowd started to boo. This was not what they wanted to see – some resistance was all well and good in the name of sport, but a sacrifice that refused to die was not just poor entertainment value, it was downright blasphemous.

Perfidy Lanyard had reached the edge of the pit, and her plan – run like the wind and climb twice as fast – had met a snag. The sides of the pit were straight-sided and sheer except for the smallest of indentations that the carvings had made, almost impossible to climb. And if she made it to the top, she would face the blood-frenzy of the crowd who sat cheering with wide eyes and foam-flecked lips as they watched the battle below.

To add just a little more spice to proceedings, the front-row of spectators had been armed with spears and pikes. They joined in the spectacle with gusto, stabbing and thrusting wherever Perfidy Lanyard tried get a handhold. Their enjoyment didn't even seem much diminished when she started shooting back. Her ammunition wouldn't last long, though, and for every spear-jabber that she shot, another two appeared to take their places. It wasn't a solution with much promise.

Meanwhile, Madman Mallarcky was tiring. His coat hung in tatters around him and any part of his body that was not protected by salvaged Stalker-steel was bleeding. And then Seker-Ra landed a vicious blow that brought the bounty-hunter to his knees.

Seker-Ra, Gladiator god, stared down at the defiant Once-Born who knelt at his feet, bleeding in the dust. By rights, his opponent should be dead, not simply exhausted and weakened by a dozen wounds.

The crowd was shrieking for the death-blow in whatever language they spoke, but away to one side, a small knot of them were having fun defying Perfidy Lanyard's increasingly desperate attempts to escape.

Seker-Ra heard them and he turned towards the commotion that they were causing. Let the weakling Once-Born recover his feeble breath; Seker-Ra was not done with him yet. He would kill the girl first.

Perfidy Lanyard heard the crowd sigh as Seker-Ra ignored Madman Mallarcky, and then cheer again as he turned towards her – they wanted to see the blood run red.

She heard the clatter of metal limbs coming closer, interwoven with the clank of the chain and its counterweights, and she knew that her time was running out. She turned, fired a useless shot, and then fled again.

Except there was nowhere for her to go.

The heavy thud of those Stalker steps and the clunk of the chain running through the pulleys sounded loud in her ears, and cold terror gripped her. She could not look around. Seker-Ra was almost close enough to touch her now and she was starting to stumble. The Stalker-god's finger-glaives ran out again with a cold hiss, mirroring the firelight as they drew back for the death-blow...

With a surprised jolt, Seker-Ra stopped in his tracks. He strained against the chain, flailing around at the end of it as his legs refused to move another step. He half-turned – as much of a movement as he could make with the tether at his back – and there was Madman Mallarcky, leaning with all his weight against a spear from the crowd that he had rammed through one of the links of the chain and then into the ground. The spear-shaft trembled and bent, the sand in the pit-floor scuffed up around it, but the chain could move no further: Seker-Ra was pinned where he was.

For a minute, Madman Mallarcky had lain dazed in the dust. He had felt his strength ebbing from him, flowing red with every beat of his heart. For a minute, it had seemed as if the Stalker's victory was already assured, that his foe was already beaten.

But Madman Mallarcky had visited a dozen dirt-digger quacks on the road from the Great Hunting Ground to Shan Guo, and one of them must have been speaking the truth when they had charged him a hefty fee for an injection of Stalker-ichor, drained from some old carcass rusting in the mud.

Wounds that should have taken weeks to heal had knitted themselves together. Scars had formed in seconds. The bleeding had stopped. Had not just stopped; it seemed to have been reversed, so that every one of Mallarcky's heartbeats had brought new strength with it, new vigour.

Strength had returned to him, but the pain of his wounds had not been vanquished. They burned within him – maybe you had to be dead not to notice the pain – but Madman Mallarcky had defied his agonies to stand up and pluck a spear it from the hands of someone on the front row of seats. With all his strength and weight, he had planted it through one of the links of the chain that tethered Seker-Ra and had forced it deep into the ground.

"Run for the centre!" Madman Mallarcky called out from where he stood, and somehow Perfidy Lanyard stumbled onwards, finding more speed in her trembling legs.

It was then that Seker-Ra stopped trying to pull himself forwards to hunt her. He took a metallic step to one side, and the chain that hung from his shoulder-blades sagged a little. He did a little shimmy back along his own track-marks, and the chain sagged a little more. The spear that Mallarcky had thrust into the ground had taken the strain of the counterweights, and for the first time in all the long years of his captivity, Seker-Ra could turn to face the centre of the pit. He saw the links of the chain hanging lower with every backwards step he took, felt them touch the ground, dragging in the dirt.

The finger-glaives that had been drawn back for a fatal blow found a new target. They hissed through the air and severed the chain, sending the broken links thudding into the dust.

Seker-Ra was free!

10


	7. Chapter 7

**7**

Seker-Ra turned on the spot. The baying and booing of the crowd died down as he circled his own shadow, staring up at the rows and rows of Once-Born. He stepped up to the wall of the pit and touched it. It was the first time he had ever been able to get so close to it. The finger-glaives slid back into their sockets and he stroked a deathless finger across the carven scenes that he had made real. For a moment there was hush, and then Seker-Ra balled his fist and pounded a hole into the wall of the pit, then another, then another, kicking footholds into it as he climbed the height with ease and leapt over the parapet at the top. The crowds screamed again, but this time, it was with fear. Seker-Ra, Stalker-God, slayer of souls, was walking among them!

People left the benches they had been sitting on and ran every which way, looking for an escape that few could find. Some jumped or fell into the pit, but most of them seemed witless with fear. And the Stalker strode among them, dealing razor-edged death with every step. His finger-glaives flickered like lightning, and the people parted in red waves in front of him. Then he reached the priest, who alone of everyone had not moved, but welcomed the coming of the Stalker-god with half-closed eyes and whispered chanting.

Seker-Ra looked down at that tattooed face, and something shimmered at the back of his memories, through the long years of darkness and death imprisoned in the pit, another face covered all over with markings, different but similar, that had peered down at him as the life quickened in his veins and he was re-born… And then the face before him vanished into ruin beneath a silver-edged blow.

Perfidy Lanyard and Madman Mallarcky watched the carnage from the centre of the pit. The aviatrix looked at her companion, at the bare skin smeared with blood, at the scored and scratched steel that glittered there. Madman, they called him. Mad, yes, she could believe that now. But a man?

"Now what?" she asked, ignoring all the interesting questions she could think of in favour of something more useful and immediate.

"Up," with one hand Madman Mallarcky grasped the length of chain that was still taut between the counterweights and the upright spear. The other hand held his shotgun, now reloaded. "Coming?"

Perfidy Lanyard stepped closer than she liked to Madman Mallarcky and took hold of another section of chain. She tilted her head back and looked up at the pulley-system and the wheels that the chain ran through.

"Wait. I'm not sure this is such a good id…"

Mallarcky's shotgun boomed for a second time, turning the upright spear-shaft into splinters, and the counterweights hauled the chain and the two of them up into the air. Before the chain could drag Madman Mallarcky and Perfidy Lanyard up to a gruesome end in the pulley-wheels, he fired again at one of the counterweights and it shattered into pieces. The chain stopped, held taut by just enough weight to keep Madman Mallarcky and Perfidy Lanyard hanging in mid-air.

They swung there for a few seconds, fifty feet above the pit, swaying and giddy. Below them, Seker-Ra trampled the stone benches of the arena to dust. A hundred spears tried to hold him back, but he scythed through them as if they were a field of ripe corn.

"This was your escape plan?" Perfidy Lanyard watched the fresh blood flow in rivers down the steps of the amphitheatre.

Madman Mallarcky pulled a crossbow and line out from under the shreds of his coat, took aim at where the cage that had first captured them was hanging in the shadows, and fired. The line whizzed out, the bolt looped through the bars, and they had a way out.

Perfidy Lanyard looked along the length of the line as he tied it off. "You had that the whole time?"

"Yup."

"Then why didn't you use it?"

"I'm _Madman_ Mallarcky, remember? Not _Sensible_ Mallarcky."

The cage shimmered in the firelight, its ghostly edges more imagined than real. Perfidy Lanyard clambered up the line, leapt for the cage, and caught hold of the bars.

Madman Mallarcky tried to creep along the line after her, but his wounds, though outwardly healed, burned like fury. It might have been Stalker-ichor in his veins, but he was still no Stalker.

"Here," Perfidy Lanyard said, reaching across the gap for the Madman. He stretched for her hand and heaved himself up beside her. Then the two of them were sitting on top of the cage, and another climb awaited them – up the chain that held the cage from the ceiling, back to the sloping tunnel that they had fallen down.

"You can do it?" Perfidy Lanyard asked.

"For four hundred marks?" Madman Mallarcky grinned. "I'll find a way."

The sound of bloodshed and terror faded below them, and going hand-over-hand up the chain, they were soon back in the sloping tunnel. Without the avalanche of sand rushing around them, it was an easy walk up the slope towards the glimmer of sunlight from the trap-door high above.

"Poor Skink," Perfidy Lanyard gave a shake of her head. "He always said his days were numbered."

And then Madman Mallarcky had a hold of her, pushing her hard against the cool stone of the sloping tunnel. In what little light there was, the blade of a finger-glaive shivered sharp and silver against her cheek.

"What is this? Killing me won't get you your four hundred gold marks!"

"Who said anything about killing?" Madman Mallarcky replied. "I can add your dainty double-dealing nose to my collection, or you can tell me why we just nearly got killed by a Stalker."

There was a click, loud in the narrow space, and Madman Mallarcky felt the muzzle of Perfidy Lanyard's pistol press up somewhere in the region of his groin.

"Just how extensive is that armour-plating of yours, Mallarcky?" she asked.

The two of them glared at each other. Then Madman Mallarcky retracted the finger-glaive and let Perfidy Lanyard go.

She smiled and pocketed her pistol. "Thought so. So what's wrong with Magnus Crome going after Stalker-tech'? Jealous?"

"No," Madman Mallarcky grunted. "Near-death experiences make me curious, that's all. And that Anti-Tractionist Fox Spirit that intercepted me and shot me down on route to Tibesti, that was no accident."

"Of course not. The Fox Spirit is one of the trophies of London's Guild of Engineers. The encounter was… arranged. As was the courier job for Alkazar."

"I wondered what Alkazar wanted with an empty box."

"You looked inside the box?"

"Of course I looked," Mallarcky said. "Rule number one of any courier job: Always Look Inside The Box."

"Skink and his partner didn't find gold at Constantin-Opel, but they did find something else: warnings of a Stalker-God, scratched into its deck-plates. Someone fleeing the ruined city must have been captured at the oasis and then managed to escape. For all the good it did them."

They reached the top of the tunnel and triggered the trap-door. Outside, the desert was so bright that the whole world seemed bleached of colour and so hot after the cool dark that the air was like molten glass

"We better hope that Seker-Ra doesn't know another way out. Or how to fly an airship," Perfidy Lanyard said.

"Shrike knows," Madman Mallarcky replied, glancing out across the oasis. It looked the same as ever, a haven of tranquillity between the dunes, and the sunlight sparkled on the pool. Then something else glittered against the water – Seker-Ra, wading through the shallows, drawing cloudy waves after him as he made for the _Chim Chim Cher-oo_.

Perfidy Lanyard cocked her pistol and broke into a run. Mallarcky ran after her, stumbling through the drifts of sand that had crept between the bushes. The air shimmered around him, and every step brought a gasp of pain from the injuries across his ribs.

There was no way they could reach the airship before the Stalker and they arrived just in time to see an armoured arm reach out of the gondola and slash the ladder free. It tumbled to the ground in untidy coils, and the mooring lines were next. One by one the engines started, and the _Chim Chim Cher-oo_ rose up gently into the haze of the afternoon sky.

"I wonder where he's going?" Perfidy Lanyard asked, shielding her eyes against the glare and staring up after the gas-balloon as it turned into the wind.

"Does it matter?"

"Not really. I'll take the engines. You take the envelope."

Madman Mallarcky nodded and slid a tracer shell into the shotgun.

The two of them waited until the airship had pulled high enough and far enough away from them, and then they raised their weapons.

Perfidy Lanyard fired first, and the engine-pod on the starboard side of the gondola coughed smoke and sprayed fuel from a severed supply-pipe. Then Madman Mallarcky squeezed the trigger of his shotgun and a streak of white fire sped from the muzzle, bright even against the sun, and planted itself in the gas-envelope.

There was a whoofing roar as the gas cells erupted into flame, and then a stray spark caught the fuel tanks and the engine-pods exploded, showering the gondola with burning fuel. Shrapnel pattered into the sand around Mallarcky and Lanyard, and the blazing husk of the airship floated gently to the ground. The gondola crumpled, surprisingly heavy once it reached the sand, and the ribs of the airframe collapsed on top of it, still burning.

Something stirred inside the wreckage, rising up under the weight of red-hot metal, something that staggered around with its arms outstretched as if it were blind – perhaps the heat had cracked its eyes already. Flames flared around it and inside it, and Seker-Ra sank to his knees, black smoke streaming from his armoured body. Then he plunged forwards into the heart of the fire and was still. The Stalker-God was no more.

"Now what are we going to do?" Perfidy Lanyard asked, looking at the roasting wreckage of the _Cher-oo_.

"Walk to Constantin-Opel, pick up the supplies the Engineers left there, and then walk back to Tibesti," Mallarcky replied.

" _Walk?!_ It must be four or five days to Constantin-Opel, and then another week to Tibesti! We'll die! We've got nothing! No water, no food…"

"We'll travel at night once we've put some distance between us and the oasis. Water we get here," Mallarcky went over to what was left of the Engineers' airship. He slashed at one of the fluttering sections of gas-envelope with his finger-glaives, cutting out large square pieces of tissue from the ruptured cells. "We fill as many water-bags as we can from the pool while the survivors from the pit – if there are any – are still too scared of Seker-Ra to come up."

"Alright," Perfidy Lanyard said, starting to gather up the squares he was cutting. "And food?"

"Food we have right here. Or should I say, 'right ear'," the bounty hunter pointed at the withered and wrinkled flaps of flesh he carried strung around his neck. He reached up and tugged one free, then offered it to Perfidy Lanyard. "Pickled pinna?"

"No thanks," she said with a grimace. "Maybe in a day or five."

"Suit yourself," Mallarcky said, taking a chewy bite of the lobe, and the two of them hurried down to the edge of the oasis to fill their makeshift water-bags.

Then, with the black banner of smoke from the _Cher-oo_ streaming out west above them, they started to follow its inky shadow towards the ruins of Constantin-Opel, out across the sands of Seker-Ra.

 **The End**

8


End file.
